“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.”

Alice Munro | 2013 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?"

Mo Yan | From Red Sorghum | 2012 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“In the middle of life, death comes to take your measurements. The visit is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is being sewn on the sly."

“Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.”

“Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”

John M. Coetzee | From Slow Man | 2003 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”

Imre Kertész | From Liquidation | 2002 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”

“You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.”

“Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”

Günter Grass | From The Tin Drum | 1999 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts”

José Saramago | 1998 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.”

Dario Fo | 1997 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

Gabriel García Márquez | 1982 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.”

Elias Canetti | 1981 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Learning
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”

Czeslaw Milosz | 1980 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros, eros.”

Odysseus Elytis | 1979 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark”

“I would say a few words
in your ear. A doubtful man has little faith.
Live a long time and it gets dark, and suddenly you know you don’t
know yourself.
But I’d say them even so. Since my eyes repeat what they take in:
your beauty, your name, the river’s sound, the woods, the soul on its own.”

Vicente Aleixandre | 1977 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

Saul Bellow | 1976 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Absent one, how I miss you on this shore
that conjures you and fades if you’re away”

“A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.”

Eyvind Johnson | 1974 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Now we have fathomed what our space-ship is – a tiny bubble in a glass of God.”

“An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.”

Heinrich Böll | From The Clown | 1972 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

Yasunari Kawabata | 1968 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Rise and demand; you are a burning flame.
You are sure to conquer there where the final horizon
Becomes a drop of blood, a drop of life,
Where you will carry the universe on your shoulders,
Where the universe will bear your hope.”

Miguel Angel Asturias | 1967 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.”

Shmuel Yosef Agnon | 1966 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire–”

Nelly Sachs | 1966 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“The grass grows over the graves, time overgrows the pain. The wind blew away the traces of those who had departed; time blows away the bloody pain and the memory of those who did not live to see their dear ones again—and will not live, for brief is human life, and not for long is any of us granted to tread the grass.”

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

William Faulkner | 1949 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”

“You shall create beauty not to excite the senses but to give sustenance to the soul.”

Gabriela Mistral | 1945 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.”

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen | 1944 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“How sad that love is still awakening of the finest and most pure, and in most cases only after it becomes dirty.”

Frans Eemil Sillanpää | 1939 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”

Pearl Buck | 1938 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“I always have a pad of paper and a pencil within reach, to catch on the wing this turn of phrase which strikes me as felicitous, that idea which I hope to be able to examine more closely in the light of day.”

Roger Martin du Gard | 1937 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

“Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!”

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Henri Bergson | 1927 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.”

Grazia Deledda | 1926 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

George Bernard Shaw | 1925 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“I dreamed of great actions, of voyages–rovings across the oceans of a free and independent life.”

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont | 1924 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

William Butler Yeats | 1923 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“If people could hear our thoughts, very few of us would escape from being locked away as mad men.”

Jacinto Benavente | 1922 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.”

Anatole France | 1921 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“…I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.”

Knut Pedersen Hamsun From Hunger | 1920 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Halt silent, my dear, and take me with you!
The evening is nigh, and the summit is remote.
I will play for Kurzweil a ditty like. ”

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler | 1919 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“Thor sang: Who is Svend among the attendants, who beyond Sundet stand?”

Karl Adolph Gjellerup | 1917 Nobel Literature Prize Winner

“This thought has been ascribed to Voltaire: If God did not exist, mankind would have invented Him. I find more truth in the reverse: If there really is a God, then we should seek to forget Him, to raise up men who will to do good for goodness’ sake, not out of fear of punishment for their bad deeds. How can someone give alms to a poor man with a clean heart when he believes, and has an interest in believing, that there is a God who keeps score in heaven, who looks down and nods in approval?”